The popularity of computer and network technologies has been rapidly growing for the past two decades; however, it has been accompanied by a steady growth in cybercrime, which ranges from relatively harmless cases, such as distribution of unsolicited e-mail, commonly known as spam, to more serious cases of cybercrimes, such as denial of service attacks, stealing of confidential financial information, and even cyber warfare and terrorism. It has become obvious that it is imperative to aggressively combat cybercrime. And, one of the most commonly used means for protecting computers from cyber attacks is antivirus software. However, current generation of antivirus software solutions has shortcomings.
Antivirus applications are generally resource intensive, which has detrimental effect on the productivity of computers on which they are deployed, especially during performance of frequent and complex antiviral tasks. Examples of such tasks are checking hard disk for malware, which significantly loads computer's disk system, and frequent updates of antivirus databases, which consumes network bandwidth. The consumption of processing resources by antivirus application especially affects personal computers (PCs), notebooks and other types of computers that have limited processing capabilities. It has been observed by the inventors that the processing load on such computers can be reduced if the antivirus application is run from a separate device, which can be connected to the computer to perform antivirus testing tasks.